


Sunset

by MittenWraith



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Dreams, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Sunsets, Tumblr Prompt, what the hell do I tag this?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MittenWraith/pseuds/MittenWraith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was sent this ask on tumblr the other day:</p><p>Anonymous asked: But also also! Everyone is talking about Casifer feeding those damn birds. All I saw was Cas by a lake. And then there's a scene where that recurring photo of a dock at a lake shows up behind Dean. And then then, the sunset question to Dean. Allllll of which makes me wonder: out of all the times Cas popped into Dean's dream and found himself beside Dean's peaceful lake, did any of them happen to occur at sunset? </p><p>And answered it in <a href="http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/138637752320/but-also-also-everyone-is-talking-about-casifer">Very Serious Meta Blog</a> mindset, when it actually was asking for fluffhappy headcanon treatment. I often get confused between the two. SO Here is attempt number two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunset

****After that first time Cas showed up in his dream, it didn’t happen again for a while. Granted, they had been kinda busy, what with Sam releasing Lucifer from the cage and Cas getting blown up in Chuck’s kitchen. The dreams started back up after their trip to Maine to corner Raphael and demand a few answers about where God had shuffled off to. Maybe they’d actually bonded over Dean’s failed attempt to hook Cas up with Chastity at that brothel, or maybe it was just the fact that Cas had actually _had fun_  on his little adventure with Dean.

They'd spent close to a week on the road together, and it was one of the first times they’d actually just had a chance to talk to each other about very much of anything that wasn’t directly relevant to the apocalypse. It was... nice.

Dean had been disappointed when Cas took off again on his search for God, but he was pleasantly surprised when Cas turned up in his dream the next night. He’d just pulled over into a rest area on the side of the highway to catch a few hours of sleep on his way across the country to meet back up with Sam, but the minute his eyes closed, he found himself back on that pier with a fishing rod and a case of beer. It was late morning, and the sun had risen warm across his back.

He didn’t notice Cas lurking behind him at first, and he nearly fell off the end of the dock into the lake when Cas’s shadow fell across his shoulders. Cas settled his jangled nerves with a gentle touch to his shoulder, and they fell into an easy conversation reminiscent of the ones they’d had on that long road trip to Maine.

Cas asked Dean how his drive was going, about what Sam had been doing while they’d been apart, and tried to apologize again for getting them kicked out of the brothel. Dean just laughed, and then asked Cas how his search for God was going. When Cas replied, defeated and with downcast eyes, Dean grew serious and told him to pull up a chair. They both could use the rest.

After that, their dream-chats became a regular occurrence. Dean was surprised the first time Cas joined him somewhere other than by the lake. In the dream he was in Bobby’s garage working on the Impala, and Cas announced his presence by handing him the wrench he needed. Even in his dream, it startled Dean into banging his head against the hood. They shared a beer while Dean walked Cas through the basics of engine maintenance and they mostly tried to not talk about the end of the world.

Sometimes Cas would join him in the passenger seat as he drove down some lonesome highway in the middle of the night. Sometimes they’d be sitting at a bar while some random roadhouse band played in the background. There was that one time Cas sat with him through an entire cross-country plane flight and he didn’t freak out even once. Cas’s company had been more than enough to reassure him that the plane wouldn’t crash, no matter how hard his brain tried to convince him otherwise.

The dreams had happened in the dead of night, while he dug graves or sat in motel rooms or lurked in abandoned buildings waiting for monsters to kill. They took place in the middle of the day at diners and libraries and out on the prairies he’d traversed a thousand times in search of a new hunt. They featured places he’d been before and a few he’d either seen in movies or on television or just dreamed up out of thin air.

After the apocalypse failed to happen and Sam was gone, and he’d fled to Lisa’s to try and start his life over again, the dreams became much less frequent. It was like Cas was just showing up to check on him. He never stayed long, and Dean didn’t feel like he had any right to ask him to. Dean wasn’t part of the Grand Plan anymore. Cas had more important things to do, what with trying to run Heaven and all.

Oddly enough, it was shortly after Dean got back into hunting that the dreams stopped altogether for a while. Dean still dreamed about the same places he used to hang out with Cas, and he had the strange feeling like Cas was there with him, but lurking just out of sight, like he didn’t feel right intruding on Dean’s dreams anymore, like he might not be welcome anymore.

Dean realized much, much later that it had been guilt that kept Cas away, but just close enough (and probably invisible) to assure himself that Dean was still essentially okay. Dean wasn’t okay, and neither was Cas.

They stopped altogether when Cas tried to eat Purgatory and then wound up disintegrating himself in that lake. The only time lakes and Cas showed up in dreams for a long time after that were the nightmares he woke up shaking from.

But then, just as suddenly as they’d stopped, he started dreaming about the pier again, and fishing. It was always the same exact dream, at the same exact time of day. Sometimes Cas would be standing by his side, staring down at him with a pinched little frown, head tilted like he was trying to puzzle out how he got there, or what he was supposed to be doing. The second Dean tried to talk with him, he’d disappear, and Dean would wake up shaking almost as much as he had from the nightmares.

Then he found Emmanuel, and helped Cas regain his memories. For weeks after that, while Cas lay catatonic in that mental hospital, Dean’s dreams were profoundly bizarre. It’s like somewhere inside the madness he’d taken from Sam, Cas still remembered their old dreams and was trying to relive them, but he couldn’t quite sort out the details properly.

In one dream, Cas showed him the path of a bee from flower to flower from the bee’s point of view. That had been a pretty wild ride, Dean had to admit despite how weird it had been. In others Cas had tried to show him other interesting things he had seen over the millennia he’d been watching over the earth. Half the time their little trips were intriguing and entertaining, but the other half sometimes left Dean feeling wrung out to his core. Those were the times where Cas discovered some long-treasured memory of his simply no longer existed. Time had just washed them away as if they’d never existed at all. It made Dean feel extraordinarily small.

Oddly enough it had been in Purgatory where the dreams all went back to normal. There wasn’t much of a chance to get any sort of rest at all in the land of monsters, but whenever he found a minute to close his eyes, it was like Cas was waiting for him to give him a few minutes of peace and color to remind him there was something more than the clammy gray-tinged mist of Purgatory.

Cas showed him the ocean at sunrise, rose gardens in mid-morning, wheat fields at noon, and tropical rainforests in mid-afternoon. Dean often found Cas in his dreams, the both of them stretched out on Baby’s hood in a field miles from civilization just gazing up at the night sky. Sometimes they’d watch meteor showers, or lunar eclipses, or even fireworks. But in Purgatory the dreams never lasted as long as Dean wanted them to. He just wanted to find the angel and get them both the hell out of there; to get them both home.

It happened one night after Dean found Cas by that riverside. They’d been fighting off Leviathan, and Dean had been on the verge of collapse. Benny went off to scout the route ahead, while Cas hung back with Dean to watch over him while he slept for a bit.

Dean found them both sitting together at the end of that dock, the sun setting over the hills on the far side of the lake as their feet dangled into the cool water, their pants rolled up to their knees. It actually felt pretty damn spectacular. Dean couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken off his boots. It hadn’t really been a priority in Purgatory.

They didn’t say much. They didn’t really need to anymore. They just sat together and watched the sun set, throwing off a storm of pink and orange and purple and red, reflected in the smooth surface of the lake.

Ever since then, whenever Dean inadvertently calls out to Cas in his dreams, if there’s any way at all for Cas to answer him, that’s where he and Dean will meet, at the end of a dock on a warm summer evening, watching the sunset as they send ripples out across the glass-smooth surface of the lake when their feet gently stir the water, blending all the colors of that perfect sunset into patterns they create for themselves. Every time he wakes from one of those dreams, Dean swears to himself that someday, it won’t be a dream anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I still think it didn't turn out exactly fluffhappy, but let's call it _hopeful_. If you also have fluffhappy headcanons you'd like me to accidentally turn into serious meta, or vice versa, please come find me on the tumblr at [mittensmorgul](http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com)


End file.
